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Syntax sugar is nice. It helps PHP sidestep the age-old criticism about its crappy API, although the crappy API is still there if you want to use it. What's re

by kijin 5y ago

Syntax sugar is nice. It helps PHP sidestep the age-old criticism about its crappy API, although the crappy API is still there if you want to use it. What's really great about PHP these days is the development environment. Composer is a rock-solid package manager. Most frameworks and important libraries are gravitating toward shared standards defined by PSRs. Thanks to those shared standards, the APIs are stable and easy to understand. There's no colors/faker/left-pad drama. Everything just works out of the box and keeps on working. Everything is extensively documented. And somehow the runtime keeps getting faster without breaking backward compatibility.

mschuster91 5y ago
> There's no colors/faker/left-pad drama. Yet. Composer packages have the same attack surface as NPM packages, the only thing that is different is that there are (outside of frameworks like Drupal and Symfony) no automated post-install scripts that get executed during a "composer install". The fundamental difference is that lots of what is popular in the NPM world isn't needed in the Composer world at all due to PHP's extensive stdlib (meaning, less people having to maintain trivialities like left-pad and thus less potential for people to get hacked/sell out/get burned out in frustration). Furthermore, most highly popular PHP projects have extensive corporate, consulting or foundational backing - Symfony, Drupal, PHPUnit, Laravel, Typo3, MediaWiki, Wordpress to name the biggest players - and each of these provides to developers what the stdlib is missing, so there are strict QA and release procedures to prevent a repeat of the current colors/faker events.
- kijin 5y ago
  Totally agreed. Despite PHP's reputation as a beginner-oriented, haphazardly designed language, the ecosystem as a whole feels much more mature and well-organized with multiple stakeholders and strong safeguards.

by kijin 5y ago

mschuster91 5y ago

> There's no colors/faker/left-pad drama. Yet. Composer packages have the same attack surface as NPM packages, the only thing that is different is that there are (outside of frameworks like Drupal and Symfony) no automated post-install scripts that get executed during a "composer install". The fundamental difference is that lots of what is popular in the NPM world isn't needed in the Composer world at all due to PHP's extensive stdlib (meaning, less people having to maintain trivialities like left-pad and thus less potential for people to get hacked/sell out/get burned out in frustration). Furthermore, most highly popular PHP projects have extensive corporate, consulting or foundational backing - Symfony, Drupal, PHPUnit, Laravel, Typo3, MediaWiki, Wordpress to name the biggest players - and each of these provides to developers what the stdlib is missing, so there are strict QA and release procedures to prevent a repeat of the current colors/faker events.

kijin 5y ago
Totally agreed. Despite PHP's reputation as a beginner-oriented, haphazardly designed language, the ecosystem as a whole feels much more mature and well-organized with multiple stakeholders and strong safeguards.